M.X-Country travels to Bethlehem for Paul Short Invite

The Penn men's cross country team will inadvertently imitate the anti-hero of Yeats' The Second Coming by slouching toward Bethlehem tomorrow with hopes that its time has come round to take on the nation's elite cross country squads. The team will travel to Bethlehem, Pa., tomorrow to race against 42 other cross country teams in the ultra-competitive Paul Short Invitational hosted by Lehigh. "This is without a doubt our toughest race so far," Penn head coach Charlie Powell said. "There will be four teams there who are in the top 20.? It's just hard-core competition." The Quakers come off their first free weekend of the season and are still riding high from their first-place finish at Delaware two weekends ago. The course and size of the field on Saturday will certainly test the Quakers' resolve. "It's a very fast course. It's basically pretty flat," junior Sean MacMillan, whose times have led the Quakers in the first two meets of the season, said. "There are just some rolling hills." The relatively flat course, which will take the nearly 300 runners across cornfields, promises to make the race extremely fast-paced from the start. "You're going to have something like 12 All-Americans in this race, and they're all going to be gunning for each other," Powell said. "It's going to be tough from start to finish. If you don't stay focused, you'll just get lost in a crowd." Two weeks ago in the Delaware Invitational, a much smaller meet, Penn was able to bunch up from the beginning of the race and transform the five-mile contest into a three-mile event. The field at Paul Short will be much too large and much too illustrious for the Quakers to dominate early. "This is not going to be a sit-and-kick race. We'll need to focus for the whole five miles," MacMillan said. National powerhouses such as Michigan, Michigan State and North Carolina will greet the Quakers on the starting line tomorrow. Additionally, the field will boast Mt. St. Mary's and Georgetown, both regional pace-setters, as well as Ivy rivals Princeton, Brown and Cornell. Powell will select a varsity group of seven to combat these juggernauts. The seven will be Clayton, MacMillan, sophomore Bryan Kovalsky, freshman Matt Gioffre, junior Mark Granshaw, senior John Horrocks and junior John Krol. The field's depth will doubtlessly demand the fastest times of the year from the Quakers. "There's no way you can expect to be near the top 10 and not be under 25 minutes," junior captain Scott Clayton said. No Quakers have broken the 25 minute barrier yet this year. MacMillan, Clayton and Kovalsky led the squad at Delaware with 26:12, 26:16 and 26:23, respectively. Still, now is the the time of the year when times usually start to drop significantly. "In cross country, you usually start to feel a lot fresher in October. You tend to be pretty tired throughout September. Your legs just feel a lot better now," Clayton said. This past week marked a departure from the schedule the Quakers have been keeping throughout the season thus far. The road mileage was less intense, and for the first time in the season, the hardest workout of the week will come on race day. "I just wanted to get our guys ready for this race," Powell said. "For some of them, it's their first race this big. For others, they haven't had this kind of pressure since last year. They just gotta get going again." This week has done much to get the team ready for tomorrow. Before practice on Thursday, they appeared loose and determined. They are a disciplined bunch who are ready to take it to the next level. The Quakers will not control tomorrow's race, but they have a chance to attract national attention. They can greatly improve on their No. 38 ranking in the NCAA coaches' poll. "If some of our top guys run a perfect race, we can definitely be up there at the top," Powell said. It may be a very rough beast which slouches toward Bethlehem tomorrow.